OK, if the T-Rex was allowed onto the Ark, didn't it start eating people? [View all]

Five years after it opened, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., still gleams, and life-size dinosaurs still tread the Earth, shoulder-to-shoulder with humans. But behind the scenes, one of the most ambitious efforts in America to counter evolutionary theory has hit a roadblock.

When you walk into the Creation Museum, one of the first things you see is an exhibit of a doe-eyed human child crouched next to a velociraptor dinosaur. The two seem not at all surprised that their epochs have collided. Homo sapiens and velociraptors missed each other by a good 65 million years, according to most scientists, but in the world of the Creation Museum, humans and dinosaurs were created on the same day 6,000 years ago, coexisting peacefully in the Garden of Eden. A thousand years later, a 600-year-old man ushered them onto Noah's ark.

Answers in Genesis, a ministry founded in Australia, built the Creation Museum. The group seeks to convince others that the theory of evolution is wrong and that the account of creation told in Genesis is literally true. The result: a place that resembles a slick and entertaining natural history museum, even as it peddles the exact opposite message.

Now, the people behind this museum are looking to erect something much bigger: a 160-acre park with a life-size replica of Noah's Ark built to stand 500 feet long and 80 feet high. They're hoping to tap four teams of Amish builders to construct this giant ark, which would become the largest timber structure in the country. Including parking and other areas, the entire Ark Encounter would sit on 800 acres about a 40-minute drive away from the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. ...................(more)